Reclaiming Your Life After a Divorce
Overcome the worst. Reach towards a better life.
Divorce can be a devastating experience.
Different circumstances make the process more or less dramatic and complicated: if there are children involved, if there has been infidelity, physical violence or emotional abuse.
Regardless of the circumstances, as long as it’s a marriage between consenting adults, every divorce has one common heartbreak: the loss of your best laid plans for the future.
Even if divorce feels like a liberation, the process of resetting your life can be a painful one. No one marries with divorce in mind. You do it with the best hopes for a beautiful future together. When you look far at the horizon of your life, you know what’s there, the one thing you can count on as certain: companionship, and perhaps even happiness, in the twilight of your days.
Divorce is a painful way to break that promise. It can feel like the floor beneath your feet has suddenly disappeared and you’re on freefall. It can feel like all the air has been sucked out of the world just as you were halfway through a deep breath.
The good news is: for as much as it hurts, you can overcome the pain. It takes time, dedication, and a good amount of self-love, but divorce doesn’t have to define your life, you can (and you should) reclaim it for yourself.
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you go through the recovery process.
Acknowledge your pain: you have the right to be upset
Sometimes, we bury our emotions deep down and avoid facing them properly.
When going through a divorce, your gut reaction might be to ignore your pain in an attempt to make the recovery process easier and quicker. If you don’t acknowledge it hurts, then it will stop hurting, right? Probably not.
Many factors may drive you to ignore your pain, put on a brave face and pretend what you’re going through doesn’t affect you: a sense of pride, or shame, or rush to move on.
There are a few problems with that strategy, however. First, ignoring your pain consumes a lot of emotional and mental energy. Our emotions aren’t meant to be suppressed indefinitely, they eventually require an outlet. Depending on how intensely they’re suppressed, and for how long, those emotions eventually find an outlet in the shape of physical or even mental illness.
Acknowledging your pain doesn't mean to wallow in it indefinitely. It doesn’t mean you should let your pain take the reins and determine how you behave.
What acknowledging your pain means is to allow yourself time to stop, assess your emotions and let yourself feel it. Remind yourself that you have good reason to be in pain, you’re not being weak or unreasonably dramatic. Your life is changing in a major way, and even though the end of a marriage might mean the end of a bad relationship, it’s also the end of a vision you had for your life, one in which you invested many years on. It hurts lose that.
Divorce is painful. Acknowledge the pain, allow yourself to feel it, then prepare to let go and move on.
Don’t give in to shame
You have nothing to be ashamed of, unless, of course, you cheated on or abused your partner in any way. If that’s the case, than being ashamed is the bare minimum.
In most cases however, there’s no reason to give in to shame when going through a divorce.
It’s not easy to share the news of a divorce with family and friends. Yes, shame might be part of the cocktail of emotions you’re feeling, but just as with pain, allow yourself to feel it and then let go.
Remember, there’s no shame in moving on with your life. If you’re the one who asked for the divorce, there’s no shame in acknowledging that a relationship has run its course, and it doesn’t fulfill your needs any longer. If you received the request from your partner, then there’s no shame in letting someone go after they’ve made clear they don’t want to be by your side anymore.
Your sense of shame also arises from fear of what other people might think about your situation. You may be afraid they’ll think you didn’t put in enough effort into your marriage, that you didn’t care about it enough, and that’s why it fell apart.
Here’s how you deal with other people’s judgments: you ignore them.
The only people who were there for all of it, and who know how much effort each spouse put into the marriage, are the two of you. You’re the one who knows, other people can only speculate — and they will, no matter what you say or do.
So let them knock themselves out.
Remember: you are enough. You don’t need anyone’s validation
Your marital status doesn’t define who you are.
You’re born whole, you don’t need a partner to “complete you,” and you don’t need anyone’s validation to define your worth.
“Not one ounce of my self worth depends on your acceptance of me.” — Quincy Jones
You get to define who you are and establish your worth as a person through your character and your actions, not by how others perceive you.
Don’t blame yourself for what’s not your fault, but be honest about your mistakes and learn from them
A divorce is an unsettling event. It may throw not only your life, but also your judgement completely off balance. When looking back at what brought you to this point, it’s not uncommon to be tempted to fall into one extreme or another: either blaming yourself for everything, or pointing the finger at your spouse and considering them solely responsible for what went wrong.
In most cases, unless there has been infidelity or some kind of abuse, it’s impossible to blame only one person for the end of a marriage. It takes two people to get married, it also takes two to break it.
Finding balance between acknowledging your shortcomings and understanding what wasn’t your fault takes time and effort. Mistakes, however, are formidable teachers. When you have enough humility to seek learning from yours, you’re sure to grow a lot as a person.
Ask for professional help. You don’t have to handle everything alone
In moments of crisis, professional help may be the missing item to restore some amount of peace and order into your life. When it comes to a divorce, professional help may include, besides lawyers, therapists, councilors, psychologists, and others.
There’s nothing wrong in relying on friends and family to help you get back on track, but these aren’t always the most objective people to discuss your issues with. The beauty of professional help is that it can offer you the kind of unbiased perspective that people closest to you are often incapable of.
Friends and family can offer sympathy and support, but they often reinforce your perception of a situation instead of challenging it, which can get in the way of you achieving clarity and a healthy sense of closure. Friends and family are also more likely to pat you on the back and tell you nothing was your fault, perpetuating your sense of victimhood (justified or not) and delaying your emotional and psychological development by helping you avoid taking a long hard look at your own shortcomings.
A professional therapist, for example, will not only help you to acknowledge the wrong that your spouse has done to you, but to also face your own flaws in a controlled and healthy pace, allowing you to grow from the experience without falling into a dark hole of guilt and despair.
Don’t forget: It’s never too late to reshape your life
Getting a divorce can feel like you’ve let a good chunk of your life go down the drain. It can feel quite despairing to look at all the years you have invested into a relationship you thought would last forever, but that’s now over. Starting over seems like an insurmountable challenge. You are, after all, not as young as you were on your wedding day.
In the moments when reshaping your life feels impossible, remember: you’re not exactly starting over from scratch. You have the advantage of experience, of all the lessons you’ve learned during those years of marriage, and chances are you have just been made stronger by your divorce.
Adjusting to your new life without a spouse can be difficult at first, but you can take the opportunity to completely reshape your life. It’s a matter of attitude more than time. It’s a matter of taking a look at your talents and advantages and identifying what you can best use them for.
Invest in hobbies. Perhaps now is the time to take that photography course you’ve always wanted to, or join that volunteering group you’ve been hearing so much about. Perhaps you can take advantage of your newfound freedom to move across the country for a new job, or take a sabbatical, start a business, get a new degree. The possibilities are endless.
What matters is to keep moving forward with your new life instead of perpetually mourning the old life you left behind.
Allow yourself some time, it does make everything better
You might feel pressured to “bounce back” as quickly as possible. Being eager to show that you’re “doing just fine” after a divorce is understandable, but allowing yourself time to mourn the relationship that has just ended may be a healthier approach.
You’re not selfish for taking time for yourself. You’re not weak for crying. You’re not incompetent for not knowing what to do next: you’re just adjusting to a new life.
Allow yourself time to recover at a steady pace instead of rushing forward. You might accidentally rush into a precipice if you’re not careful to stop and pay attention to where you’re going.
You’re stronger than you think
That’s what I found out after my divorce, and that’s what I’m sure you’ll find out as well. If you only take one thing out of that whole experience, let it be a newfound sense of inner strenght.
